I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
I have few illusions about privacy -- feel free to follow me on Twitter: kashhill, subscribe to me on Facebook, Circle me on Google+, or use Google Maps to figure out where the Forbes San Francisco bureau is, and come a-knockin'.

A court case in California could bring an end to the Facebook problem of “SocialCam spam,” and bring a legal headache to video providers who have jumped on the Facebook auto-sharing bandwagon.

Video providers such as SocialCam, Hulu and Viddy have embraced Facebook’s frictionless-sharing option, allowing their Facebook users to automatically tell the world about all of the videos they watch (whether we want to know or not). Video provider Netflix, meanwhile, has steered clear of frictionless sharing — not because it thinks it’s intrusive, but because it thinks it might be illegal thanks to a pesky federal privacy law on the books that specifically prohibits the sharing of people’s movie-renting activity without their informed, written consent. A recent ruling from a judge in California suggests Netflix might be right.

Netflix decided that the Video Privacy Protection Act stands in the way of its letting user share with the world every blockbuster, romcom, tear-jerker and T.V. episode they watch — and so it’s been lobbying hard to get that law changed. It was originally passed after a Supreme Court nominee’s video store gave a list of the movies he’d watched to a reporter. Hulu’s lawyers came to a different conclusion than Netflix’s. The 1988 law name-checks “video tape service providers” involved in the “rental, sale, or delivery of prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials;” Hulu decided that didn’t apply to its streaming video service.

Then Hulu got sued. A class-action lawsuit in California alleged Hulu violated the VPPA by “wrongfully disclosing [plaintiffs'] video viewing selections and personal identification information to third parties suchas online ad networks, metrics companies (meaning, companies that track data), and social networks.” Hulu tried to get the case dismissed, saying the VPPA doesn’t apply to it. But a federal judge disagreed[PDF] and is letting the case proceed.

“To this reader, a plain reading of a statute that covers videotapes and ‘similar audio visual materials’ is about the video content, not about how that content was delivered (e.g. via the Internet or a bricks-and-mortar store),” writes Judge Laurel Beeler. “The question is whether the mechanism of delivery here – streaming versus bricks-and-mortar delivery – ends this case at the pleading stage. Hulu’s [argument is that] it is not a ‘video tape service provider’ because the VPPA does not expressly cover digital distribution (a term that did not exist when Congress enacted the statute). Given Congress’s concern with protecting consumers’ privacy in an evolving technological world, the court rejects the argument.”

This is not the end of the line for Hulu. The case continues, and Hulu will continue making it’s “The-VPAA-Doesn’t-Apply-To-Me” argument, and should it go to a trial, a jury may come to a different conclusion than this judge. But it’s the first time a court has weighed in on whether the VPAA applies to the online world of video; if it’s telling of what’s to come, it would mean that Hulu, SocialCam, Viddy and others will need to rethink how their online sharing works.

“I believe it does spell trouble,” says William McGeveran, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. “I think the VPPA requires case-by-case consent for social media disclosures. I haven’t looked at Viddy, but the interfaces for Hulu and Socialcam don’t appear to satisfy the VPPA. The ‘play and share’ button I’ve suggested before would comply.”

Otherwise, video providers can keep pushing to change the VPAA, a push legislators seem open to. The House okayedan update to the Video Privacy Protection Act in July that would allow a “video tape service provider” to disclose people’s activity on an “ongoing basis,” with consent “obtained through the Internet.” Senator Patrick Leahy recently started pushing to get the Senate on board with the update. Leahy was actually one of those who authored the law back in 1988, and Judge Beeler quoted his testimony from that time as part of her reasoning as to why it should apply to Hulu.

She quoted Leahy saying this: “It is nobody’s business what Oliver North or Robert Bork or Griffin Bell or Pat Leahy watch on television or read . . . . In an era of interactive television cables, the growth of computer checking and check-out counters, of security systems and telephones, all lodged together in computers, it would be relatively easy at some point to give a profile of a person and tell what they buy in a store, what kind of food they like, what sort of television programs they watch. . . . I think that is wrong, I think that is Big Brother, and I think it is something we have to guard against.”

Apparently Big Brother doesn’t seem as scary now — in the time of Facebook — as he once did.

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“a pesky federal privacy law on the books that specifically prohibits the sharing of people’s movie-renting activity without their informed, written consent.”

Users did give that informed, written consent, when they agreed to the Terms of Service on Facebook that said Facebook can pull information from Hulu to share on Facebook.

Since there are at least two thousand ways to get around that, if someone didn’t like that sharing, such as, you know, not being signed into Facebook and Hulu at the same time, or using one browser for Facebook and one for Hulu, how is this even remotely a problem for Hulu?